I was able to round up world city names and locations, so that this could be included as well. Specifically, I came across Josh Smith's worldwide-city-database on github, which itself is based on the Maxmind WorldCities Database. This is a tab-delimited ~130MB file of a more than two million world cities/places, their population, and latitude/longitude. Since I already had US cities and their location, I parsed out just the non-us cities with a population of at least 10,000 via a sequence of awk commands (included for my future reference):

which resulted in the data file used in the visualization (I only realized I needed to do this conversion after some of the characters were not rendering correctly).

Here's an example record from the data file (with the header row included)

combined

population

country_code

region

latitude

longitude

Andorra la Vella, Andorra

20430

ad

07

42.5

1.5166667

For a given non-US country, a random city is chosen by picking randomly based on the city's population as fraction of the sum of all of the cities for the country in this data file - this leaves out the smaller cities that might need to be included in some cases, and so I might return to this.

A recent screenshot is below. Clicking on one of the cities in the lists will perform a google search on that city in a new window. I still need to deal with the challenge of displaying the events on the map as they occur in a way that makes it easier to discern the specific places.

There are so many cities I just had no idea existed. And seeing the simulated events in such specific geographic context as the simulation progresses adds a sobering poignancy.

The purpose of this page is to summarize in one place some of the interactive visualizations I have worked on. Most of these were built...

"When you start on your journey to Ithaca, then pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge... Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the voyage at all." (from "Ithaca", by C. P. Cavafy)